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Vancouver, get ready for a Beckstravaganza

Mother Mother and Hey Ocean are among the bands participating in Beckstravaganza, a performance of all the songs in Beck's Song Reader. It takes place Thursday at Vancouver's Rio Theatre.Photo: Gina Ribisi/Supplied

VANCOUVER – Chances are very good that you haven’t heard a single song from Beck Hansen’s Song Reader.

The singer-songwriter’s 12th album presents something of a challenge to listeners — it was released last month as a book of sheet music.

Versions of the songs are featured on the website of publisher McSweeney, mcsweeneys.net. You can pick up an instrument and play the 20 new tunes from the songwriter behind generation-defining songs such as Loser.

Or, you could head to the Rio Theatre Thursday and hear Vancouver’s very own Broken Mirrors performing the album in its entirety.

The relatively new band with one EP to its credit plays tours behind CR Avery and at a monthly residency at the Rio Theatre with the Wet Spots.

For its Song Reader show, the band put together one of the most thorough lineups ever seen in this city, including CR Avery, Headwater, Debra-Jean Creelman, Company B, Rococode, The SSRI’s, Hilary Grist, bee-keeper, Ben Rogers, Buckman Coe, Leah Abramson, Khari Wendell McLelland, Christie Roe, Cameron Dilworth, Van Driver and Jesse Waldman.

“Actually, I can confirm that we’ve added Hey Ocean and Mother Mother to the list as well. It’s pretty crazy,” says the Broken Mirrors’ guitarist Noah Walker. “We’ll be the house band for most of the acts, although a few bands will do it all on their own. It really suits Beck’s incredibly cool return to the original model of music distribution to do it this way.”

Before the advent of mass appeal record players, sheet music was indeed the way that people could follow a hitmaker such as Cole Porter or George Gershwin. You would head to your local music retailer to buy the single, come home and plunk away at your piano while everyone sang along.

Walker says that what Beck has done with this new album is put together 20 very complex and demanding songs true to his style and vision with an accompanying book that makes for “a really exciting and vital album. Nothing about this is a gimmick.”

“His albums are always a big collection of a lot of different things, from folk/blues to jazzy funk and so on. This time, he has written songs that you might see in an old 1930s songbook. But every time you follow along to the fairly standard progression, there will be some chord thrown in that has you going ‘That’s so Beck.’ Plus, probably because of putting it down on paper, the lyrics are some of his very best. Some of these songs are beauties.”

Tuning back to a time when musical literacy existed in the majority of the population is interesting in its own right.

A great number of today’s artists and audiences couldn’t begin to comprehend musical notation, so Song Reader is forever closed to them. Walker and his compatriots are all fully fluent in the language of music and this lends itself to ever-widening interpretations of the album’s material in a live setting.

“All the members of the band have studied all kinds of other musical forms and styles, and we can actually go there with Beck’s material. For instance, we have Company B, this great jazz vocal group, doing one song with us that is full-on the Boswell Sisters kind of swing jazz. Elsewhere, it’s fully punk rock. Twenty songs is a lot to play with.”

There are actually more than 20 songs in Beck’s big concept project.

“On the back of each song sheet, he has also written up these jingles for fake advertisements as well. This would have been the norm at the height of sheet music retailing too. So you have even more songs to play.”

With CD sales flatlined, vinyl on the comeback but in no significant numbers, could a return to the old singalong salon be in the works?

Beck has certainly inspired a wave of players to consider the possibility.